Saturday, September 03, 2011

One of the perks of getting to cover the Dodger game as media is that you get access to the Dodgers' clubhouse. It's basically a narrow corridor, wider than a hallway, lined by players' lockers along the long walls and some couches and seats and clothes hampers in the center. There are flat screens hanging from the ceiling, as well as reminders of the Dodgers' six world championships along some of the wider rafter spaces along the ceiling.

Still photography is forbidden.

I got down there before the game started and while the players were eating dinner and having their pre-game meeting. Pleasant odors wafted from their kitchen but I pressed on into the abandoned room.

And one thing I thought was interesting was how the players' lockers were organized, given it's probably not random and they want to put certain players next to others. So I spent the time to list the locker order (based on the stickers above the lockers), which I figure I should post now before the September call-ups happen in earnest. Extract your own conclusions:

I guess all the pitchers go together. I must have missed Josh Lindblom and Russ Mitchell somehow, too (I was typing on my iPad so it might have auto-deleted or something inexplicable, as often happens).

I also noticed that many of the players had a couple of bobbleheads on the top shelf in their lockers. Kuroda's, at the end, had a ton stashed up there: two Duke Snider bobbleheads, two Don Mattinglys, two Hong-Chih Kuos. Garland, who walked by pre-game after doing what appeared to be a workout session (his upper body was wrapped with an icepack on his shoulder), had five bobblehads out of the boxes on his shelf (Guerrier had some out of box as well). Kershaw had a number of bobbleheads in their boxes, but had his own bobblehead as the sole bobble out of box.